Chilean police on Friday arrested dozens of people, including press photographers, when they broke up a May Day demonstration in the capital Santiago. Demonstrators had gathered in the city's Plaza Italia in defiance of a government prohibition on public gatherings of more than 50 people as part of measures against the coronavirus.
By Guy Ryder (*) – In the time of coronavirus, the big challenge for most of us is how to protect ourselves and our families from the virus and how to hold on to our jobs. For policymakers, that translates into beating the pandemic without doing irreversible damage to the economy in the process.
One hundred and fifty years ago, workers in Britain came together to create the world’s first national trade union centre, the TUC, in the city of Manchester. They, and working people in many other places at that time, laid the first foundations for the global trade union movement of today, more than 200 million strong. Ever since those early steps, men and women organizing together have built and grown their unions and changed the course of history.
Brazil's populist president Dilma Rousseff vowed at a protest on Sunday, International Labour Day, that she would go down fighting ahead of what could be her final full week in power before impeachment.
Argentina’s strongest unions brought thousands of people into the streets Friday to protest high inflation and job cuts in the biggest demonstrations against President Mauricio Macri since he took office in December. Demonstrators waving blue and white Argentine flags flooded the main avenues of Buenos Aires, blocking traffic in a protest that brought together rival unions that put aside differences to protest Macri’s policies.
Argentina's powerful organized labour leader Hugo Moyano called for President Cristina Fernandez, CFK, to run for re-election but also asked for greater labour participation in the ballot lists, sharing companies’ profits and seats in the boards of the main corporations.